Some Penguin Classics seem to come along at just the right time – actually a great many of them do, but this time was just right for Maurice Evans’ wonderful 1977 edition of that lost, sparkling diamond-mine of English literature, Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.

The Arcadia got its start in the leafy inner garden of Wilton House, the Wiltshire home of the Earls of Pembroke (and before them a place of quiet and contemplation for nearly a thousand years as an English priory); the first pages of it began as an intellectual game of ‘top this’ between beautiful young Philip Sidney and his lovely sister Mary, with her cheering him on and him rushing off to some isolated bower to dash off more paragraphs. Despite how wrathful the Pembroke blood could be, Wilton rang with laughter in those warm and breezy days of 1580 – and the earliest version of the old Arcadia was born amidst that laughter.

It’s the story of Arcadia’s King Basilius, who learns of a terrifying prophecy: he will lose his throne to a foreign power, he will lose his two daughters (one to abduction, one to unnatural lust), his sons-in-law will be accused of murder, and he will commit adultery with his own wife. He promptly bundles up his family and heads for the hills, hoping he can escape the prophecy in a rustic retreat. Of course that’s not how prophecies work, and when two princes in disguise conduct a rather forceful wooing campaign against the king’s two daughters, the florid, playful romance, the ‘delightful teaching’ of Arcadia takes off.

Evans was a sweet-natured and hard-working scholar (and a fine explainer of George Chapman, no small thing in this day and age), a perfect emotional match for this book. Any popular edition of the Arcadia has its work cut out for it, starting with deciding on which Arcadia to deal with at all. Philip Sidney had been working on a version of the book for a few years before his sister got her hooks into it in 1580, and then once it began to have a life of its own, once he began to see that there was something to it (and once the thriving intellectual community Mary Sidney always inspired began responding to those earliest pages), Philip began radically changing and expanding the work. He died in 1586, and his friend Fulke Greville shepherded a version of the Arcadia into print in 1590 – a jumpy and infelicitous version, although well-intentioned. Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, brought out a pretty folio version of the work in 1593 – smoothed out, softened in some of its brutalities, in every way a loving sister’s version of her brother’s book. Greville’s version would have made Sidney pat his own head in frustration; Mary’s version would have made him smile; neither is the version he would have shown the world himself, but that’s one of the prices you pay for dying a hero’s death at age 32.

Evans takes to this tangle with a gardener’s patience, pruning one version here, grafting another there, until he has a version that just might have pleased everybody (except short-tempered legendary Elizabethan translator John Florio, who not only thought Mary should have minded her own business but was churlish enough to say so in public). His notes are masterful but unobtrusive; his textual emendations are expert but almost invisible; and the encouragement he gives in his quiet, intelligent Introduction will be just enough for the curious reader. Those readers will encounter the full glory of Elizabethan prose, served up by its freakishly precocious greatest master:

But Zelmane, being rid of this loving but little loved company, ‘Alas,’ said she, ‘poor Pyrocles, was there ever one but I that had received wrong and could blame nobody, that having more than I desire, am still in want of what I would? Truly, love, I must needs say thus much on thy behalf; thou has employed my love there where all love is deserved, and for recompense hast sent me more love than ever I desired. But what wilt thou do, Pyrocles? Which way canst thou find to rid thee of thy intricate troubles? To her whom I would be known to, I live in darkness; and to her am revealed from whom I would be most secret. What shift shall I find against the diligent love of Basilius?

There aren’t many of those readers for Sidney anymore, as Evans hardly needs to note. The long, enthusiastically rhetorical romance that reaches its apotheosis in the Arcadia (and the more action-oriented romance that reached its pinnacle with Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso) might have prepared the intellectual soil for the coming of the novel – it’s eerie to read these things and see so many of the elements in place – but it wasn’t able to grow in that soil. The joyful rush of words, the precise, Olympian employment of the temporal vernacular in the service of the eternal verities … not to mention the heavy flirtations with allegory, a fatality for the morosely egotistical modern era … all doomed The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia to the scholar’s shelf the moment Samuel Richardson first put pen to paper and rediscovered the ways to detach delight from teaching for a paying public.

It’s unlikely the exquisite entertainments of Wilton House will ever again gain purchase on the English-speaking imagination, but this wonderful Penguin Classic – in some form or other – will always be here. For the curious.